Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ gives a well-articulated list of advice for start-up CEOs. I think it applies to all types of CEOs, team leaders, and in some cases consultants. Go read the list…. which includes: You need: A Voracious Appetite for Knowledge Seeing the Good in Everyone Caring About More than Money And some specific…
DetailsThere is plenty of buzz out there about how the economy is slowing. Companies will begin pulling back on expenses and unfortunately cut on staff, too, if it gets worse. But smart companies know that there is no better time to surge forward and leave competition wondering what happened. Social marketing, with authentic messages, is…
DetailsBill Dotson called out a great article about professional service firms. It’s spot on about how such firms approach their website. They want the partners in the firm to like it – after all, partners agree on the marketing budget, so why not get them involved in the design? Surely someone who works day-in and…
DetailsA great website cannot save a poor/ordinary/boring product or idea. And great SEO/SEM cannot save a poorly done website. If you have an ordinary commodity product, stop.
DetailsEven in our time-shifted, portable entertainment-craving society, podcasts have not made much headway. Has the public lost interest because of any one reason? Has iTunes helped or hurt the podcasting community. Where’s Google in all of this?
DetailsIf I email you and don’t get a response on December 24th, I’m not going to sit around wondering why and think you’re a lazy son-of-a-bitch. Autoreplies are evil, and serve little purpose except in mission-critical solve-it-now roles like doctors, lawyers involved in litigation, and IT professionals running high TOS systems. Not you. Turn it off :-)
DetailsOne of the most difficult challenges is tracking paid search performance via telephone calls for the small business. While a few will spring for a new 800 number or IVR system to get some of that information and train phone staff in its use, many cannot due to the workaday reality. Often the busy office environment means metrics go out the window in favor of just getting the order out, so the company continues to guess.
DetailsI dislike Volusion for many reasons, but this one stands out. Searching their owners manual gives results, but you must bang through each to find anything. So far, everything in Volusion takes 5x more steps than I think it should. Anyhow, no time to write that book… here’s an example of a useless SERP typical…
DetailsIn the past few months’ time I’ve spent more than my usual amount of time watching others surf the web. I am always astonished by how poor people are at knowing where to type searches, or web addresses, or login information. When I ask someone to go to a website, there is genuine confusion about…
DetailsDear Retailer. When I snap a photo of something, I’m not here to scam you. I’m not the front for a big Chinese manufacturer who is about to knock off your stuff and put you out of business. I’m not planning out an elaborate “Mission Impossible”-style robbery. I’m using my phone to shop. You need to get ready for this, and embrace it.
DetailsA terrific brain trust of folks answered great questions that I’ve tried to aggregate into an organized list you may find very helpful. Enjoy! The Q/A was especially helpful and added a lot to the session. Moderators: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence TIP: See the end…
DetailsMobile Search: Beyond 10 Blue Links Fascinating presentation at SMX Local Mobile. Mobile searchers don’t want lists of web pages – they want answers or fast ways to take action. Mobile search providers are increasingly experimenting with alternative interfaces, such as location-aware browsing, voice recognition, text messaging and other innovative approaches. Learn about these new…
DetailsShow Me the Money! So there are Billions out there. But who’s making money now. How will SEMs place bets now to ensure their success? Show me the money! Moderator: Greg Sterling Speakers: Ian White, CEO, Urban Mapping Shawn Riegsecker, Chairman & CEO, Centro Justin Sanger, CEO, LocalLaunch Alfred Chow, Head, Yellowbook Lots of…
DetailsLocal businesses want leads and customers, not clicks. Although pay-per-click and pay-per-call are the two prevalent ad models to reach local searchers, will other models like CPA/PPA ultimately be more effective? (Partial Liveblogging – other presenters not blogged… couldn’t get a coherant flow going :-P) Steven Chuck, Director of Strategic Alliances, Yahoo!
DetailsModerator: Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence Marc Barach, CMO, Ingenio joined for the Q&A Throughout this writup: PPC = pay per click.� Don’t confuse it with PPcall Lots more after the jump…
DetailsThis is a liveblogging entry from SMX Local/Mobile – a conference I’m attending in Denver, CO. This was the best session I’ve attended yet at the conference. Lots of great information and engaging speakers. Good questions from the room and highly relevant content. Bravo! Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land Speakers: Alex Porter,…
DetailsI found this on JonathanFields.com, and it resonated. Some people thrive on the energy of a constant battle. On how badly they can take those around them. Not me. It kills me. And, at least for me, I discovered there is a much better way to launch and grow your small business or reinvigorate your…
DetailsGoogle’s Expected to roll out their “PowerPoint” killer soon, if not today. Even though I was one of the engineers on Harvard Graphics (PowerPoint was called the “Harvard Graphics Killer”) I am really a advocate leaving slide shows out of meetings. It’s far too easy to create slides. You need people staring at you at a table giving you feedback with their body language, good and bad. You need to know that you got through to them. Will Google’s “PowerPoint” just make more awful presentations for us all to sit through?
DetailsA brand is a person’s gut feeling, because brands are defined by individuals, not companies, markets, or crowds because people are emotional, intuitive beings. Great slide deck, nicely done.
Details
It’s the era of user-created content. Is there a minefield being laid by more and more sophisticated crawling tools employed by the stock agencies, the increase in user-created media, and the pinch felt by artists as microstock and low-cost stock shops grow. For those of us managing dozens or even hundreds of sites, it is very, very easy for an unauthorized image or illustration to make its way into a website. And then the fur will fly.
DetailsIt seems everyone’s bending over backwards to optimize my pay-per-click campaigns for free these days. Google did it a couple of weeks ago, and now Microsoft Adcenter has chimed in. Can the PPC campaigns really offer good value to customers without conflict-of-interest becoming a problem? Or is it a “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” issue?
DetailsRetail stores don’t seem to realize the importance of customer touch points. That phone call ringing in the background is not as important as customers already in the building. If that phone rings a few times, both the receptionist and the salespeople need to have confidence it will then ring to someone else for handling or to a well designed voice mail solution. Leaving a customer during the sales process is simply throwing away the entire process people have worked hard on up to that point.
DetailsIt would seem ludicrous to even consider SEO services that send garbage SPAM, but amazingly I talk to people at least once per week who have “gave them a shot” because it “surely can’t hurt anything.” In fact, it can hurt a LOT of things. Here’s a deconstruction of the spam itself.
DetailsIs it constitutional for a government agency to keep a criminal history public indefinitely crawlable on Google, arguably providing, through its results pages, a public criminal history without a statute of limitations of any type? What if expungement is impractical due to the indexing activity of search spiders? Are we forever locking past mistakes in the strata of the web?
DetailsWhen you look at your web pages you focus like nobody else in the world. You look at each part of it thinking about the effort that went into the design. You might feel proud or relieved it is done. You know the reasons you put certain text in certain places, or remember the steps…
DetailsJakob Nielson’s latest Alertbox is the longest-read enewsletter in my list. In the latest Alertbox, he points out “designers can get so caught up in their own theories about how users ought to behave that they forget to test for cases in which people behave differently” Could it be that the mechanics of setting up multivariate testing neutralizes this “worry”? Should variable definition be more of a part of the web design process?
DetailsFranchises need to toot their own horns. A lot. The press release engine needs fuel. And a plethora of magazines with glossy covers are ready and waiting to stroke their collective egos in front of entrepreneurs craving an escape from the 9 to 5. But with the possible exception of Entrepreneur magazine, most would do well to ignore these publications completely and do their own research.
DetailsHaving a focused, promise-keeping landing page is a concept that experienced Pay Per Click advertisers know well. Often learning this truism happens the hard way – after spending thousands of wasted dollars. One of the most important design lessons that I’ve learned when it comes to any sort of web page is this: The Landing…
DetailsIn your web project, do you have parts that dead-end, with little chance of making you the best in your industry? Are there areas you should focus on in hopes of reaching the other side of the dip, joining the elite players of your business? Are you ready to sort those out, focus on the ones that matter and discard the rest?
DetailsIf you’re presenting at a conference and using a powerpoint deck or some illustrations, don’t post a URL for your stuff to be downloaded. This is a blind method that will not provide you with valuable information about the people who came to retrieve it.
Details